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OOW 2009 : SUN-rise on a SUN-day

This week I am in San Francisco for my third Oracle Oracle Open World. Because it was my second consecutive visit I received an "Oracle Alumni" tag (for my badge) and a nice jacket during registration. This Sunday the first session (at 800 AM! - OOW is really hard work...) was by...me! There were around 50 to 60 attendees, and IMHO that's not too bad for a session at that time. The session seemed to be interesting enough for 111 people to include in their schedule, but I guess for a few of them it was too early after all...The session went ok, not great, but ok. I would rather do a session after being a couple of days in the US, because then you're more used to the language. This one was within 20 hours of arrival. Right after my session - and a well deserved cup of Starbucks coffee with Edwin - I went back to the "Holland ACE House", where I am staying with Marco, Andreas and Jacco, to drop off my laptop. BTW the house, rented by Anjo (thanks mate!), is very nice. You can see the pictures here. Right after that I went back to the Moscone for some sessions within the ODTUG track. They were all about migration to APEX. One company moved from Access to APEX, another from PowerBuilder / Cobol / to APEX. Another proof that APEX is suitable for smaller (Access like) apps as well as Enterprise level applications.After that on to the Hilton for a presentation by "Mr PL/SQL" : Bryn Llewellyn, about OnLine Application Upgrade. Bryn thoroughly explained the goal and the use of the new 11gR2 feature "Edition Based Redefinition".Meanwhile I missed the APEX 4.0 session (I have seen the major part of it at last June's ODTUG), but it was very well received. If you're interested you should take a look at Lucas' blog post.Then off to the impressive Hall D for the opening keynote of this year's OOW by Scott McNealy, the chair man of Sun. He did a good job presenting two top tens - in an almost Oracle-red sweater. Also on stage came James Goslin, the inventor of Java. Dresses in an old jeans and a baggy T-shirt he perfectly fitted the description of a Java nerd. Scott introduced "his hero" (what sounded a little bit sarcastic): Larry Ellison. Larry, again, stated that Oracle will spend more money on the development of SPARC, Solaris and MySQL than Sun would do. Apple already proved that the combination of delivering hardware and software can be successful, so why can't Oracle do something similar?The main part of Larry's talk was aimed at IBM. Larry stated that IBM is more expensive, uses more electricity (that's why they call it the "POWER" processor ;-) ) and not fault tolerant. Suns runs Oracle twice as fast than IBM. Larry also announced a new chapter in the Oracle - IBM competition: If your database doesn't run two times faster on Oracle/Sun than you'll win 10,000,000!

In the evening the ACE dinner was organized on a nice location near the Bay Bridge.

Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.
That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user.The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even worse) while you…

Nowadays Docker is everywhere. It is one of the main components of Continuous Integration / Continuous Development environments. That alone indicates Docker has to be seen more as a Software Delivery Platform than as a replacement of a virtual machine.

However ...

If you are running an Oracle database using Docker on your local machine to develop some APEX application, you will probably not move that container is a whole to test and production environments. Because in that case you would not only deliver a new APEX application to the production environment - which is a good thing - but also overwrite the data in production with the data from your development environment. And that won't make your users very excited.
So in this set up you will be using Docker as a replacement of a Virtual Machine and not as a Delivery Platform.
And that's exactly the way Martin is using it as he described in this recent blog post. It is an ideal way to get up and running with an Oracle database …

If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one:
then you disable the "Escape special characters" property and the result is an updatable multirecord form.
That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03.
But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows.
So for processing y…